Father Tim Jones, the parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda in York across the pond, raised eyebrows worldwide when he suggested this course of action.
"My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift," he said. "I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither."
It's better, he said, to steal from a large company that can better absorb the loss than a mom-and-pop operation, and to only take what you need.
The Venerable Richard Seed, Archdeacon of York, says the church does not endorse Fr. Jones' suggestion. "The Church of England does not advise anyone to shoplift, or break the law in any way," he said. "Father Tim Jones is raising important issues about the difficulties people face when benefits are not forthcoming, but shoplifting is not the way to overcome these difficulties."
There's a name for this mindset Fr. Jones seems to subscribe to. It's called "situational ethics," and if there's anything that explains why our society is on a fast train to nowhere, that's it.
With situational ethics, a person is constantly looking for a justification for his wrong actions, covering his butt with slick semantics, or couching his choices in lawyer-proof language. It could be someone saying he steals because he's poor, a politician who sells his vote for pork and calls it "compromise," or an adulterous president quibbling over the definition of "is," but it's all the same. Situational ethics puts us on the slippery slope to no ethics at all.
Hate to sound all intellectual and stuff, but some things are meant to be in black and white. Either something's right or it's not. Either something's true or it's not.
Now what's so difficult about that?
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